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Nishikado graduated with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1968. He joined Pacific Industries Ltd in 1969, a subsidiary of the Taito Trading Company. After working on mechanical games, in 1972, he developed Elepong (similar to Pong), one of Japan's earliest locally produced video arcade games, released in 1973. He produced over 10 video games before Space Invaders was released in 1978. He left Taito in 1996 to found his own company, Dreams. As of 2013, he is no longer with Dreams, and presently works for Taito as a technical advisor.[6][7]

His first original titles included the sports gamesDavis Cup and Soccer, both released in 1973.[3]Davis Cup was an early team sport video game, a tennis doubles game with similar ball-and-paddle gameplay to Pong but played in doubles,[8] allowing up to four players to compete.[3]Soccer was also an early team sport video game,[3] and an early video game to be based on football, specifically association football. Soccer was also a ball-and-paddle game, but with a green background to simulate a playfield, allowed each player to control both a forward and a goalkeeper, and let them adjust the size of the players who were represented as paddles on screen.[9] Nishikado claims Soccer to be "Japan's first video game" released.[6]

"Speed Race" redirects here. For the manga, anime and film franchise, see Speed Racer.

1974 saw the release of Nishikado's Speed Race, an early black-and-white driving racing video game,[3] which he considers to be his favourite among the games he had worked on prior to Space Invaders as well as "possibly the first Japanese game in America (distributed by Midway)."[10] Released in November 1974,[11] and running on Taito Discrete Logic hardware,[12] the game featured sprites[13] with collision detection. The game's most important innovation was its introduction of scrolling graphics, where the sprites moved along a vertical scrolling overhead track,[14] with the course width becoming wider or narrower as the player's car moves up the road, while the player races against other rival cars, more of which appear as the score increases. The faster the player's car drives, the more the score increases.[15]

In contrast to the volume-control dials used for Pong machines at the time, Speed Race featured a realistic racing wheelcontroller,[3] which included an accelerator, gear shift, speedometer, and tachometer. It could be played in either single-player or alternating two-player, where each player attempts to beat the other's score. The game also featured an early example of difficulty levels, giving players an option between "Beginner's race" and "Advanced player's race".[15] The game was re-branded as Wheels by Midway for released in the United States and was influential on later racing games.[14]Wheels went on to sell over 7,000 video game arcade cabinets in the United States.[16][17] Midway also released a version called Racer in the United States.[14] The game received two sequels, Speed Race Twin in 1976[18][19] and Super Speed Race in 1977.[20]

The game introduced dual-stick controls,[24] with one eight-way joystick for movement and the other for changing the shooting direction,[22][25] and was the first known video game to feature game characters and fragments of story through its visual presentation.[3] The player characters used in the game represented avatars for the players,[23] and would yell "Got me!" when one of them is shot.[3] Other features of the game included obstacles such as a cactus,[26] and in later levels, pine trees and moving wagons, that can provide cover for the players and are destructible. The guns have limited ammunition, with each player limited to six bullets,[21] and shots can ricochet off the top or bottom edges of the playfield, allowing for indirect hits to be used as a strategy.[21][26]

Western Gun was his second game licensed to Midway for release in the United States. However, the title was changed to Gun Fight for its American release.[27] Midway's Gun Fight adaptation was itself notable for being the first video game to use a microprocessor.[28] Nishikado believed that his original version was more fun, but was impressed with the improved graphics and smoother animation of Midway's version.[3] This led him to design microprocessors into his subsequent games.[3]Gun Fight was a success in the arcades,[23][29] was later ported to the Bally Astrocade console[23] and several computer platforms.[21][30]Gun Fight's success opened the way for Japanese video games in the American market.[28]

Nishikado's next title was Interceptor, released in Japan in 1975[6] and abroad in 1976. It was an early first-person shooter and combat flight simulator that involved piloting a jet fighter, using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft that move in formations of two, can scale in size depending on their distance to the player, and can move out of the player's firing range.[5]

In 1977, Nishikado began developing Space Invaders, which he created entirely on his own. In addition to designing and programming the game, he also did the artwork and sounds, and engineered the game's arcade hardware, putting together a microcomputer from scratch. Following its release in 1978, Space Invaders went on to become his most successful video game.[31] It is frequently cited as the "first" or "original" in the shoot 'em up genre[1][32][33]

Space Invaders pitted the player against multiple enemies descending from the top of the screen at a constantly increasing rate of speed.[33] The game used alien creatures inspired by The War of the Worlds because the developers were unable to render the movement of aircraft; in turn, the aliens replaced human enemies because of moral concerns (regarding the portrayal of killing humans) on the part of Taito. As with subsequent shoot 'em ups of the time, the game was set in space as the available technology only permitted a black background. The game also introduced the idea of giving the player a number of "lives". It sold over 360,000 arcade cabinets worldwide,[34] and by 1981 had grossed more than $1 billion,[35] equivalent to $2.5 billion in 2011.[36]

Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto considers Space Invaders a game that revolutionized the video game industry; he was never interested in video games before seeing it, and it would inspire him to produce video games.[50] Several publications ascribe the expansion of the video game industry from a novelty into a global industry to the success of the game, attributing the shift of video games from bars and arcades to more mainstream locations like restaurants and department stores to Space Invaders.[51] The game's success is also credited for ending the video game crash of 1977 and beginning the golden age of video arcade games.[2] The launch of the arcade phenomenon in North America was in part due to Space Invaders.[52]Game Informer considers it, along with Pac-Man, one of the most popular arcade games that tapped into popular culture and generated excitement during the golden age of arcades.[53] The game also played an important role during the second generation of consoles, when it became the Atari 2600's first killer app, establishing Atari as the market leader in the home video game market at the time.[31]Space Invaders is today regarded as one of the most influential video games of all time.[37]

^ abcBill Loguidice & Matt Barton (2009), Vintage games: an insider look at the history of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the most influential games of all time, p. 197, Focal Press, ISBN0-240-81146-1

^ abSteve L. Kent (2001), The ultimate history of video games: from Pong to Pokémon and beyond : the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world, p. 64, Prima, ISBN0-7615-3643-4

^Jiji Gaho Sha, inc. (2003), Asia Pacific perspectives, Japan, 1, University of Virginia, p. 57, retrieved 2011-04-09, At that time, a game for use in entertainment arcades was considered a hit if it sold 1000 units; sales of Space Invaders topped 300,000 units in Japan and 60,000 units overseas.

^Steven Edward Jones (2008). The meaning of video games: gaming and textual studies. Taylor & Francis. pp. 84–5. ISBN0-415-96055-X. Retrieved 2011-04-10. The developers of Halo are aware of their own place in gaming history, and one of them once joked that their game could be seen as “Space Invaders in a tube.” The joke contains a double-edged insight: on the one hand, Halo is first and finally about shooting aliens; on the other hand, even the 1978 2-D arcade shooter, Space Invaders, designed by Tomohiro Nishikado for the company Taito, is more interesting than that would suggest.